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As announced in our last blogpost about the official release of Cyclops 2.0, which is finally out and is adding new features.

The collector that is being released today is the Ceilometer Usage Collector. This collector enables Cyclops 2.0 to provide full rating, charging and billing support to an OpenStack deployment using the data provided by Ceilometer.

In addition to the announced features, our team has pushed forward in the development of the new Usage Collectors. The Usage Collectors are the entry point of data for the Framework itself. They consist of isolated microservices that gather data from a specific provider and distributes it via RabbitMQ to the UDR microservice.

Our flagship open-source framework for cloud billing – Cyclops has matured to version 2.0 today. Over the past several months, Cyclops team at ICCLab have gathered community feedbacks, worked systematically updating and re-updating the framework core architecture to make the whole work-flow of billing of cloud services clean and seamless.

The core components in principle are still same as in our previous releases: udr, rc and billing micro-services, but they have been written again from scratch with main focus on modularity, extensibility, and elasticity. The framework is highly configurable and can be deployed as per the unique needs of billing use-cases of any organization.

Nova manages all compute resources in OpenStack. Today, the Cyclops team is announcing support for compute events such as VM Creation, Deletion, and Modification for billing purposes in Cyclops. All this by directly tapping into the OpenStack message bus for processing critical events in real-time. Continue reading →

Cost and usage prediction can be a powerful tool in the hands of cloud operators as well as end users. Forecasting can help operators gain insights into the future trends in demand of compute, storage and network assets. From an end users’ perspective, forecasting enables them to perform budgeting. ICCLab’s RCB Initiative has been actively pursuing this subject for incorporation into Cyclops framework.

A few weeks ago, Cyclops gained a linear predictor as an additional feature, but it was not integrated in the dashboard module. In this week’s release the Cyclops team is happy to announce the Graphic Interface support for Prediction Engine. Furthermore, the prediction engine now supports random-forest prediction algorithm.

The first version of the Rating, Charging and Billing Dashboard is now available on Github! The dashboard is targeted towards a cloud service provider and their client. It has different views for an end user and a cloud administrator. The dashboard interacts with the different micro services of Rating, Charging & Billing to get the relevant data and for storing the configuration settings.

In the past few months, the ICCLab has been developing a generic rating-charging-billing engine that would offer cloud service providers a modular framework that enables dynamic pricing activities and distributed design. The model closely follows the general accounting process, in the same time providing a lot of flexibility due to the loosely-coupled design. The platform is currently being developed in Python on top of OpenStack using its Ceilometer component for collection and extraction of the metered data. To enable this facility, we have created a custom Ceilometer client that uses REST APIs to get the needed data records. The key architectural components are:

Mediation module: The data coming from the monitoring devices needs to be combined in a single user session and transformed in a common format.

Billing module: The basic billed amount in a billing cycle is generated by aggregating the charge records and readjusts it by applying discounts, penalties, taxation etc.

User/Management interface: The service can be accessed by a web-based user-interface that allows configuration of every aspect of the RCB process.

In the video below, a demo of the first Cyclops prototype is being shown. In the scenario, we take a look at the basic admin features: listing all the tenants and their respective users, checking the user status, calculating the accumulated cost per user, as well as starting a periodic counter for the specific user. The facility for defining the pricing function for a particular user, allows the admin to choose some of the available meters and apply standard arithmetics to get the desired formula.

This is the first prototype for our RCB solution. In future, the platform would offer more advanced rating and charging models with the support for discounts, taxation, penalties etc, as well as support for other cloud platforms.

ICCLab attended the OpenCloudDay in Bern en masse. Being one of the most known (infamous?) cloud computing groups in Switzerland, we had to show our strength at one of Switzerland’s most prestigious cloud events!

Cloud has revolutionized the way we think of computing now. Now everything is on-demand, self-service, pay-as-you-go, and scalable. Although, these are welcome features that tremendously reduces the CAP-Ex and OP-Ex for any business, but the true potential of the clouds in regards to novel rating-charging and billing potentials has yet to be realized. Infrastructure clouds are being treated as commodity now. Much of the innovation is now shifting towards platform and software services over infrastructure clouds.

Telecom domain has always seen lots of innovations in this regard – different tiers of pricing, bundled services, numerous packages, and what not. And think about it – they only offer in reality just 1 type of service namly voice traffic. They have standardized their protocols, they even have a standard to facilitate charging and billing a.k.a Diameter. Not downplaying the significance of their innovation, the standards are needed as the consumers are mobile and they roam from one business domain into another – and unless their interfaces, user-equipment radios, accounting is streamlined (read standardized) it would be almost impossible to support the demands of a modern telco consumer.

So now the question to ask is – is there a need to replicate what has been done in the telecom world for the cloud services? I tend to lean towards a NO. The needs of the cloud consumers are not same as a telco consumers. By keeping things manageable and simple – cloud providers can keep costs low which further reinforces the USP of the clouds – simplicity and lower costs. The computations in the cloud are generally not mobile – there is typically no need. By virtue of the Internet – a computation could take place in any part of the world and there is a complete delinking of customers’ actual location and where the services are being offered from, as long as certain broad-ranging SLAs are satisfied. Therefore there is no real need for cloud hardware systems to implement complex plethora of standards. And that could be argued for the charging and billing strategies too (there is a need for standards in the consumer facing management interfaces for mitigating vendor lock-ins, but I reserve it for another blog post for another day).

A unified and simple billing strategy would work wonders for the consumers. But one also should be mindful of willy-nilly application of such a strategy. There is a need to justify the cost to the consumer as well as the cost to the provider. And hence a proper rating-charging engine is desired. And that is where there is still a lot of room for innovation in the world of clouds. Modern infrastructure management stacks including CloudStack and OpenStack already include monitoring models and metering functions in their core offering. These must be utilized by the provider in determining the real cost of operating their cloud infrastructure, and then tie this to the cost offered to the consumers.

A proper rating-charging engines would really help the providers make a sound judgement in this aspect. There are already numerous open source products including jBilling, openbillingsystem.com, opensourcebilling.org, etc. in the market. The “open” part is a severely crippled offering either providing simple billing interfaces, or features without ability to compute and process “usage data records” (UDRs). There is a real need for a true open-source platform that would allow numerous cloud services to accurately undertake rating-charging activity for their customer so that they can keep the billing model accurate, simple but “no simpler”.

If we now consider PaaS services – there is a scope to do lot more with a unified RCB engine. The umbrella of metrics of interest would be dependent on the platform services and therefore the RCB engine must be adaptive for such systems. The built-in measurement systems have to be evaluated and proper metering mechanisms enabled / provided.

In summary, rating-charging-billing innovations are necessary for several reasons (money, money, and more money …), and the innovations in the world of the clouds are just starting.